Topeka, Kansas, 1880. It had been an unmercifully hot summer that June, with days of 100 degrees and nights almost as hot. The Kimpards were one of the last great flourishing ranching dynasties of the Old West.
Calvin Kimpard had taken over the family ranch, Robrey (named for its originators, his great-grandparents, Robert and Audrey Kimpard). Eighty years later, Calvin, his wife Cecelia, and their three children oversaw the ranch with an iron fist and admirable efficiency. They had several negroes employed to work their vast cotton, tomato, bean and onion fields, crops that netted the family substantial wealth and prominence. To the residents of Topeka, the Kimpards were THE Great American Success Story.
Cecelia Kimpard (nÊe Endicott) was an Easterner at heart. The raven-haired beauty of English and Finnish origin came to Kansas in 1861 (when it was granted statehood), at age 19, from Virginia. There, she met a tall, extremely handsome young man of twenty at a cotillion. Not satisfied with societal pleasantries alone, she slyly trailed the flaxen-haired young man with the chocolate-brown eyes until the two young people consummated a night of fire-hot passion in a gazebo by the moonlit river. Three months later, the now pregnant young woman was newly christened Mrs. Cecelia Endicott Kimpard. Six months after that, a son, Calvin Jr., was born, followed by daughter Angelica in 1867, and a second son, Jonathan, in 1871.
The family was prosperous and well-liked by all, including their workers. Ethan Smith, their Black foreman, came to them after escaping a lynch mob in 1876. At 26, he was a large, powerfully muscled man whose well-toned form sparkled in the sun akin to an ebony statue. The family was taken to his gregarious laugh and tall tales, and he was a close bodyguard to the Kimpard children, whom he adored. More so, his eye more than occasionally wandered towards his mistress, whose lithe, nicely-proportioned body belied the fact that she had borne three children. It was a lust that had to be (obviously) well-hidden.
The summer of 1880 had been both a sad and joyous one, however. The elder Kimpard's mother and father had perished in a fire in their Alabama mansion, prompting a saddened and bereaved Calvin to prepare their three children for the trip south for the funeral. Cecelia had been in delicate health for the past two months, due to the fact that she was carrying Calvin's fourth child. At 38, her health would be complicated during the trip, and at Calvin's insistence, she stayed home, to be tended to in the house by Eloise and Isabel, her trusted nursemaids.
Late one evening after tending to their mistress, Eloise and Isabel went up to their quarters to sleep, leaving Cecelia, at her own insistence, in the kitchen to finish baking pies for the church luncheon the next day. At nearly eleven in the evening, the young pregnant woman should have been asleep. But baking and cooking were tasks she relished with a passion. As she peacefully hummed to her unborn baby, there was aloud, fierce banging on the kitchen door. Alarmed, but worried that someone could be in danger, she cautiously approached the door and called out "Who's there?"
"Me, Miss Cecelia," a voice slurred on the other end.
